Apparently the poit-fest did the job. It got all three from combative to “in the same boat” mentality in seconds. Good work and kudos to Paul for another unexpected (and humorous) result of the latest Monica Manuver.

Shelly: Dammit Monica! Who the hell do you think you are?? There’s no way I could have ended Nudge’s life, but Tina and I are mortal! With all your crappy landings in the past, how DARE you risk our lives like that???

Good point, Monica…now I understand how Shelly was able to crush the steamer canister, Tina’s demonic power of suggestion forced Shelly to do it even though it caused much pain. Did she ever get her hands looked at?

Yeah, I don’t get that. Umm, “She would’ve followed through with it”? Really? I didn’t know that in the Wapsi universe, demons (even a Collective of ’em) could do that. Did I just miss something in strips past?

Ohhhhh … I get it (I think). Since Tina’s demons are not bound to a normal, occupied body, they are able to affect anyone at any time in a manner similar to a person’s own demons. Shelly was already letting her Rage demon take control so Tina the demon (collective) could have exerted enough extra influence to push her over the top into mindless, murderous violence. In fact, it may be that, Tina, being a free agent, has the ability to exert even more control than usual over any human, regardless of their current mental state. This may be a new revelation about Tina and why she is so dangerous. At least dangerous when she, herself, is out of control. Or maybe it’s not all that new since Bud did say her words had far more influence than any human could.

But hasn’t Shelly combined all her demons into creepy girl? Would Tina be acting solely through Shelly’s conscious? I think creepy girl might be more evolved than to simply be compelled to act at the behest of a demon conglomerate.

Tina didn’t have to use any sort of supernatural power to cause Shelly to crush that picture. Tina just had to make her angry. Shelly normally consciously (or unconsciously) hold herself back. I assume to prevent her from hurting someone. She Shelly gets angry the restraints come off, and she can crush pictures, or toss engine blocks across the garage.

Doesn’t Bad Things ™ happen if a demon causes death? Isn’t that why Tina walks on eggshells everywhere to be extra nice to everyone?
Granted, there is a line between inciting someone and doing the deed itself. But is that line enough to save Tina? Especially as now she knows she’s been noted by the Sphinxes?

She gets a pass on this because Nudge isn’t a human. Plus I thought Tina was now free to do what she wanted because she already paid the price for harming somebody. Hmm I guess it was never explicitly said that locked in time\memory erased demons still couldn’t face more punishment.

While Tina may have restrictions against hurting humans and such, she was also mighty pissed off at Nudge. As angry as she appeared in panel 2 on the second, such restrictions were probably not in her thoughts at the moment. And, was in her ‘Wild Animal’ moment.

(P.S Anyone have any idea why my gravatar doesn’t show up here? it works on every site except this one… and even though my pic is tastefully nude, it still works on sites that have the rating down to G, which is weird)

Momentum is not conserved when poit’ing. Say you are on the equator. The earth spins are roughly at 1500 MPH. Which means you are traveling at 1500 MPH in the direction of the earth’s spin.

IF you where on the equator and poit’ed to another spot on the equator 1/4 way around the world, you would fly straight up into the air at 1500 MPH (2415 KPH). Or straight down into the ground is you went the other direction. Either way, the landing would not be pleasant.

Turns out we are both wrong. I was (mis)remembering the roational speed. I should have done the math. The Earh roations a bit over 1000 MPH at the equator. At +/- 75% latitude, you speed would be around 300 MPH.

My own contention is that, if it didn’t, poiting almost anywhere more than an inch or two away would be pretty much impossible and likely fatal – due to the fact that every point on the surface of the Earth is in motion … very fast motion (300+ MPH at the Equator) … and in a different direction from every other point.

Imagine poiting to an antipodal point – as i said yesterday – a Monica-shaped hole in Ayers Rock?

Don’t forget that the Earth itself is moving at (IIRC) 44,000 mph around the sun.
…and that sun is rotating at a few hundred thousand miles an hour around the galactic hub.
…which is moving from the center of the universe…

Next up on poit-busters, the problems with heat and the moving of human-sized masses. Not to mention the thunderclap of that much rapidly displaced air…

Yes, as I reacall, when all the velocity vectors are added together, the overall velocity comes out to be about a million miles per hour. Of course that’s average since it varies a bit depending on the current directional vector of the earth around the sun. So, even sitting still, we are hurtling headlong at fantastic speed. Kinda makes you want to grab something to steady yourself.

I honestly have no idea on what can be said about there being a (quantum?)physics discussion in a web comic comment space. though it is quite interesting to consider the workings of teleportation. I myself have come to two conclusions on this matter.
1. agreeing with txmystic, its magic so the rules don’t apply.
2. its a web comic for Christs sake! he could make them crap ducks and speak the language of cheese! there is no laws in fictional media.

This is why whenever you see someone freezing something in liquid nitrogen, they are always bundled up. Not because it’s cold, but because they have to do it in a walk-in freezer.
If you put liquid nitrogen in a room temperature room, it EXPLODES, because it boils so fast.

Also, this is true about dry ice. You can pick up dry ice with impunity, and frankly are more at risk from an ice cube. Though ice cubes don’t hover off a table from their own vapor.

I’ve been to demos with LN2 in which the freezing things bit was prominently featured – and they were at room temp.

I worked with LN2 a lot, twenty-some years ago.

If you put the handle of one of those screwdrivers with the clear yellow plastic handles in LN2, it gets cold enough quickly enough to start cracking and craze the surface of the plastic pretty quickly.

If you pour it on a concrete floor, it takes a fair amount of time to boil away. (The movies actually get that more-or-less right…)

If you take a small ziplock type bag – say the type about two or three inches square that are often used to hold small screws and such – and pour a little LN2 into it and seal it up, after a few seconds it will go off with a bang as the LN2 vapourises inside.

The Germans discovered (the hard way, one suspects) that if a V2 rocket (which used alcohol and liquid oxygen) failed to ignite after the fuel pumps were started, a gelatinous substance would ooze out of the rocket nozzle … and that it was a Highly Unstable explosive that (mass for mass) was many times more explosive than TNT.

Which is why, when lighting a grill in 3 seconds (using LOX), George Goble is emphatic that, in the midst of the 60 pounds of charcoal, there must be one lit one–or a cigarette, or something–to avoid an explosion.

However, after the 3 seconds, you do have 20 pounds of nicely lit charcoal. If your grill was not a $2.88 cheapie…

Another Interesting Thing about LOX is that enough of it poured on asphalt makes a pretty good contact-sensitive explosive – until the LOX evaporates.

When i worked at Micromeritics back in the 1980s we had temperature-sensing probes that had to give the *exact* temperature of LN2 in machines that used it. I got to calibrate them.

Part of the procedure was making LOX to use mixed with LN2 for a high-end point; we had a small-inside-diameter coil of aluminum tubing – a couple of yards at least, coiled to fit inside a standard one-liter Dewar flask. I had to fill a flask with LN2, drop the coil in, pour in more LN2 to replace what boiled off as the coil cam to temp …

…and then run O2 from a cylinder through it to condense to LOX.

I think i had to boil off three or four liters of LN2 to get one liter of pretty, dangerous, pale blue LOX…

I used to work in a lab that required the cooling of a chamber with liquid nitrogen. We had a special faucet and insulated buckets to carry the stuff. The liquid is always boiling and the large amounts of steam coming off of it is indeed quite cold…but it is still pourable and it did the job just fine…

When I was a physics grad student 40+ years ago, some of the undergraduate labs I taught involved using liquid nitrogen to cool things down. We would carry the LN2 in open-topped Thermos bottles called Dewar Flasks (or Dewars), mounted on a little cart for stability. The LN2 would slowly boil in the Dewar.

The students were allowed to “play” with the LN2 a bit after they’d completed their experiments. A favorite trick was to blow up a balloon, tie it off, put it on the floor, and pour LN2 on it. The LN2 was actually a bit colder than the liquifaction point of N2, so it would liquefy the nitrogen in the balloon. That would cause the balloon to collapse. When you quit pouring, the balloon blew itself back up as the nitrogen inside re-vaporized.

I honestly didnt think demons affect other people other than their hosts?
Oh well, learn something new(ish) every day 🙂

And thanks for that link clarifying when Bud and Tina were discussing demonic speech.
I completly missed the point in that particular comic but now i gets it 🙂

Would any of them actually be listening to Monica right now?
Personally I would just be thinking ‘notdeadnotdeadnotdeadnotdead’ swiftly followed ‘killmonicakillmonicakillmonica’ but im not a super-strong babe, trickster demi-god or a demonically driven coffee shop owner 😀

I think one thing to keep in mind is that 4-letter words in the comic are different from the same words in the comments. In the comic, the words are part of an image and not easily scanable by bots or anything else (for now). So, just because they are used in the comic, does not mean it’s necessarily ok to use them in the comments with abandon.

I, on the other hand, hate that look. It annoys me to no end. I constantly want them to brush it away from their eye. The avatar Fairportfan has is an extreme example. That character must not have any depth perception at all.

You must have never had hair long enough to cover one eye, then. You can see through it, you know. Hair covers eyes sometimes. It’s a hair style. I don’t understand what your problem is with it. You may as well be complaining about how she parts her hair.

I know they can somewhat see through it. It’s like someone having a bit of food on their cheek. You want to brush it off for them if they won’t do it themselves. Otherwise you can’t help looking at it all the time. I can’t stand even a single hair drooping across my eye, so it just bugs me to see it on anyone. Fortunately, I haven’t had to look at anyone in that condition for years.

Last frame: That’s what I meant yesterday. ‘S dangerous talking about “killing” when dealing with (a combine of..) demons..They will actually do that if asked.

Monica’s “Heads under cold water tap” intervene, did work marvelously.(like it always did withme an’ my sisters when we where in that obstinate toddler state of mind)
On the piktuurrs:
The bunch of three makes for a hilarious visual gag i’d say.

oops. My bad, Tina can only suggest killing, not actually kill ,though in this case, we’re talking about Nudge..a Demon, so Tina could have her killled without ill-effect. Buuuuut…why didn’t she do that herself with those first blows?

Still, not human, so…killable when Tina feels like it (indeed, possibly not able to. Shelly could verywell be able to rip Nudge apart..painful, to say the least . I wonder if Nudge can heal from a ripped-off head, or will the head go on yapping and scheming???.

Even if Nudge was killable via repeated blows, I doubt Tina has the physical strength to do it. She is still constrained by her female human body. She seems to punch like a male, and that gives better than average effect to her blows so she can bloody noses and mouths, but still far short of leathal. Shelly, OTOH, has not only built hers up, but seems to have reserve strength other people do not possess.